Susan IbachDeveloper Evangelist
Ramez Debbas
Academic Developer Evangelist
Jonathan RozenblitDeveloper Evangelist
Paul LabergeDeveloper Evangelist
Frédéric HarperDeveloper Evangelist
At the Canadian Imagine Cup, two students from McGill university try to address the challenge of providing healthcare in rural areas using a Windows Phone application, the cloud, and a Windows 8 application. Their solution earned them 3rd place at the Canadian Imagine Cup Finals.
India is one of the world’s largest countries, home to over a billion people. It is also one of the poorest countries, over 72% of the population live in villages. Rural India has very poor healthcare, 43$ have no access to healthcare. 70% have no resident doctor and 80% of medical workers are unqualified.
Connect doctors and patients, provide an easy way for patients to express their symptoms and provide an infrastructure for doctors to diagnose rural patients and recommend appropriate actions.
Windows Phone, Windows 8 and SQL Azure
Abhijeet Kalyan and Shravan Narayan from McGill university came up with project Neem, a rural healthcare solution. The solution revolves around a village healthcare worker. You find someone in the village who is respected in the community, and is computer literate to act as the village healthcare worker. You provide them with some very basic medical training and a Windows Phone. Using the Windows Phone they can scan the national id card of a patient. Any stored information about the patient is retrieved. The village healthcare worker has enough training to take a temperature, check blood sugar levels, check a pulse or blood pressure. These vitals can be recorded in the phone application. The health care worker can also record any particular symptoms the patient reports by tapping the area of the body and selecting the symptoms
The patient data is stored in SQL Azure and then accessed by doctors in the city through a Windows 8 application. The doctors can review the patients symptoms and recommend appropriate treatment. With the Skype application on Windows Phone, the team is also considering adding a Skype option for direct patient to doctor or doctor to healthcare worker interaction.
Shravan and Abhijeet also see a bigger picture of using the data generated from the application to help public health organizations, governments and aid agencies. A desktop data analytics application could help interpret the data and identify trends while still keeping patient information anonymous. Perhaps helping agencies identify what diseases are diagnosed in different regions.
Rural healthcare isn’t just a challenge in India, this is a challenge we face in Canada as well, as many doctors feel they will have a higher quality of life setting up practice in the city leaving small towns woefully short of desperately needed medical services. Hopefully the work done by these students will be the beginning of a solution.
Don’t let anyone tell you what you cannot do, get inspired from students who show you what you can do!
One year ago, I saw a video of students at the 2011 Imagine Cup Finals in New York City. It was inspiring. All too often we are told what we cannot do. But all it takes to make a change is a small group of committed people. When the opportunity arose to host Canadian Imagine Cup finals I seized the opportunity! With the help of an incredible group of people we held the finals at the end of April. I wanted to share with you the video from our Canadian finals. Let’s stop telling people what they can’t do, and help people realize what they can do! Thank you to everyone who was a part of this year’s Imagine Cup and especially to every student who entered, you are an inspiration to us all!
Planning is already underway for next year. Look out world, Canada is out to show you what we can do! Follow us on facebook to make sure you are first to know about Imagine Cup 2013.
This week I want you to think about the possibilities offered by using Azure with your Windows 8 apps. Azure isn’t just for Windows 8, you can use it for Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and of course PC apps as well. Azure can bring your app to the next level.
Let’s say you are building a game. Even if you don’t think of the game as a multiplayer game, you may still want to allow players to connect by adding a social aspect. I’ll give you a concrete example, where a social aspect to a game has increased is addictiveness.
Wordament is a game on Windows 8 and Windows Phone. It’s a very simple game, you get a grid of letters and you make as many words as you can in 2 minutes. Different letters earn you different scores (just like Scrabble). If you have a competitive nature, you would naturally try to improve your high score. But, a social twist to the game takes makes it far more addictive. All the players around the world try to solve the same puzzle at the same time. At the end of the round, you find out how your score compares to everyone else. You can’t help but try to move up the rankings by playing just one more round. Want to make it personal? You get a list of players with scores close to your and you can tap their names to make them frenemies, now every time you and a frenemy are playing you’ll know who beat who because your scores are listed at the top of the screen. I admit, I got to bed later than planned last night because I just had to beat PicassoCat73 before I quit for the night.
How did they do it? The magic of the cloud! Store the player names and scores in the cloud and then send out the results. Complicated? No. Effective? Yes!
This is just one of many ways Azure can improve a PC or mobile app. There is a social gaming SDK for Azure in GitHub if you want to explore it further or you can take advantage of an upcoming workshop to learn more about Azure or Windows 8!
Toronto
Vancouver
Montreal
Ottawa
if you can’t attend one of the Windows 8 events, you can still learn about how to build Windows 8 apps online at the Windows developer center and bring your app to the labs.
P.S. if you decide to download Wordament, my gamer tag is hockeygeekgirl looking forward to having you as my frenemy, but be warned I’ve been practicing!
Patrick Ayoup, a student from Concordia university built a musical key signatures application for Windows Phone and share what he learned
Check out more tips from fellow students here
Could you briefly describe your application/game?
The app that I wrote is a very simple reference/study app for music students. This app serves two purposes, firstly as a reference of the various musical key signatures, and secondly as a study application where the user can test themselves as they would with physical flash cards.
Did you use XNA, Silverlight or both?
This was my first time writing an app for windows phone, so I wanted to keep it simple. My app uses Silverlight. Since my app isn't a game, and doesn't really have any animation, I didn't look into XNA, although it would be cool to investigate for my next app now that I have seen how easy it is to develop for this platform.
What was your banging your head against a wall moment?
I have developed for iPhone in the past and I found this process to be much more enjoyable. Things just seemed to go much easier with the Windows Phone platform than with the iOS environment. The one stumbling block that I had was with creating a list view from an XML file. This was the one thing that wasn't too obvious at first.
Did you ever solve that issue?
This issue was solved quite quickly after doing a couple of quick internet searches. There seems to be a good amount of resources online already. The ones that helped the most were from Jesse Liberty.
If you had to build this same app again from scratch, what would you do differently?
I wouldn't build this app again from scratch because it is already quite simple, but what I would do is build on it and perhaps take advantage of different touch gestures and animations to help give my app a more polished feel (although by default, I find WP7 makes it easy for your apps to look nice).
Any nice surprises?
The nicest surprise for me was how easy LINQ makes data retrieval from a data source. To avoid hardcoding many similar views, I simply made a skeleton view and populated it with data from an XML file. Normally I would find this to be a tedious process, but LINQ made life easy.
Did you leverage the mobile platform?
For this app, I didn't do much that is fancy (from a mobile perspective), but I do intend to look into gestures and other features for my next version.
Did you leverage the touch screen?
Not for this version. Thinking of it for an update.
What is one thing you think you did really well in this application?
The thing that I think I did well was how I organized my code in the way that I had to write a little code as possible to get the job done. The WP7 platform really helped take care of any other distractions and enabled me to focus on just writing clean code.
Are you publishing your application/game?
My app is already available in the Marketplace: TonalFlash
Where can I learn more about your app/game?
Right now the only information is in the Marketplace.
Who developed this application?
I am a computer science student who has just completed my first year at Concordia University. I am also a graduate of McGill University where I completed a Bachelor of Music degree in Double Bass Performance. It was the idea of combining both of these fields which inspired me to develop this app.
If you want a token for the Windows 8 store, you need to attend an app excellence lab.
There is no question that the Windows 8 store is a significant opportunity, and getting in early will improve the chance of your app getting noticed. In Canada, your first chance to get a token to put your app in the store is by completing an app excellence lab. Bring your completed or nearly completed Windows 8 app to the lab and spend up to 4 hours with a trained Microsoft services engineer. They will help you get your app up to snuff, answer questions you may have, and give you tips on how you can improve your app.
In this post I’ll explain
The lab is an up to 4-hour engagement with a trained Microsoft Services Engineer. This engineer will run your app through a series of tests based on a quality checklist to ensure your app is (or will be) in top-notch shape when you submit. You will also get a chance discuss ways to make your app even better and you will get answers to any questions you might have.
When you schedule your slot, you receive a detailed survey with questions about your app, useful advice, links to guidelines, etc. The survey is not the only criteria we use at the labs, but if you follow the preparation given in the survey, you will likely have a high-level, great app.
If your app meets the criteria, you will receive a token to register your developer account. Once verified, you will be able to submit your app to the Windows store. If your app does not meet the criteria, nothing is lost. You will still end up with a much better app and you will be able to submit it when registration opens for all developers.
Attend a Windows 8 Developer Camp, Windows 8 Design Clinic or Windows 8 Hackathon (upcoming cities and dates at the bottom of this blog post)
AND/OR
Review the app-building content from the Windows Developer Centre to learn the fundamentals of building a great Metro-style Windows 8 App.
Create a Windows 8 Metro-style app (or game) TODAY. Get it ready as if you were submitting it to the store for certification.
Read through all of the great UX Guidelines online in the design section of the Windows Developer Centre.
Contact win8cdn@microsoft.com and include the following information:
Toronto May 22-25; May 28- June 1
Montreal June 4 – 8
Vancouver June 11-15; June 18-22
Excellent question, well if you live nearby, your best bet is to drive to the nearest city where there is a lab, Ottawa to Montreal isn’t that far. But, if you live in Halifax or Edmonton that could be a challenge, let alone Yellowknife or St John’s. This is something we are still working on, so here’s what I suggest. Submit your app information to win8cdn@microsoft.com as described above. I know we are working hard to find a way to handle remote submissions. I can’t make any promises, but if we can offer a remote option by submitting your information to win8cdn you will be the first to know! The dates for any remote submissions would still be during one of the physical camps in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver.
Another good question, If your app is 100% complete then there is much higher chance that you will get a store token when you leave the lab. But there is still value in attending the labs with an app that is not completely finished. Up to 4 hours with a Microsoft engineer is sure going to help you figure out what little thing you need to add to finish up your application with the confidence that when you are finished it will be store ready. So, no your app doesn’t have to be 100% complete, but the closer to finished you have your app, the more you will get out of the app excellence lab.
So what are you waiting for? Get coding Canada! I can’t wait to see what you build!